This post is pending until 1.10 is released. Once 1.10 is released, AFT drives should be fully supported.

ShareCenter Users,

We regret to inform you that we can not support Western Digitalís new Desktop disk drives with Advanced Formatting Technology for use in our ShareCenter NAS devices.

WD does not recommend (and will not support) the use ANY of their Desktop disk drives in NAS devices, including their new drives with the Advanced Formatting Technology. WD has no intention of rectifying this issue for NAS support.

According to WD, even if we were to solve the issues caused by their Advanced Formatting Technology in the standard mode, these drives may still cause problems when used in RAID configurations (especially with RAID 5).

This issue is not unique to D-Link nor the ShareCenter product line but rather relates to WDís strategy moving forward.

WD will only guarantee the compatibility of their Enterprise disk drives with NAS devices, as they are not integrated with their Advanced Formatting Technology.

As a result, we will NOT support the use of any WD disk drive with Advanced Formatting Technology.

Thank you for your understanding. Please do not hesitate to contact our team directly with any questions or concerns.

I have a WD10EARS hard drive. I do not use it in RAID only standard mode so will I have any problems with it. Its the green supposedly energy efficient drive I've been using it for a month with no problems. I mainly just ftp files between home & work with it but if there's a chance it will fail maybe I should just use it in an enclosure as a plain USB drive & buy another HD for my DNS-323.

The only thing you would notice is performance issues. We are going to try our best to work with WD and 'play nice' but it is not their intention for users to use desktop drives with nas units so we (as well as other nas manufacturers) suffer. Personally I would stay away from the 4k drives until it is more widely adopted by other HDD manufacturers and preferably ones that don't only care about Windows and Macs.

Since people have been able to work around the limitations of the 4K clusters on the DNS 323, and WD claims that modern operating systems know how to format the drives properly, shouldn't it be fairly doable to detect drives that use 4K clusters and properly align the partitions created in the firmware?

in fact the alignment can be done manually using fdisk... the problem is that at the next reboot the dlink frontend software will not detect it as a valid "dns-323 formatted driver"it is quite funny because until you dont reboot, your NAS will be running 100% fine and aligned.(tested personally)

Expect very poor performace in a few months, or after you have started writing large amounts of data. I would return those drives ASAP for something compatable.

Its unfortunate, as alot of people will buy EARS drives for this box as the retail package wouldn't indicate unsupported drives. And only hardcore people would check the forum before purchasing drives for their NAS.

I had picked up a WD15EARS HDD to mirror to my WD15EADS drive last Friday. It formatted fine, mirrored fine, then the raid "degraded" in a couple of hours. I reformated, remirrored. After a few hours, same thing, raid degraded. I returned the WD15EARS drive on Monday for a Seagate ST31500341AS, formatted, mirrored and been running fine since.

It formated ok and appeared to be working. I then copied 10 GB and it was fine. I then left it to copy 300GB to it and this morning the mirrored drive shows it was disconnected in the logs. It has be regraded. I then did a restart of NAS and it advises the replacement drive does not have a large enough capacity.